Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz’s suddenly ubiquitous word for the Republican ticket — “weird” — “is solidly Nebraskan and from the school of Carson,” writes Ian Frazier in the New York Review of Books. He’s talking about the late Johnny Carson of Tonight Show fame; both Carson and Walz grew up in Nebraska. Frazier thinks it’s good that Kamala Harris chose a Midwesterner as her running mate: “Candidate Walz should use his Carson-like gifts whenever possible. Before red and blue was a thing, the whole country loved Johnny.”
“Weird” was one of Carson’s favorite words.
Frazier believes that the middle of the country grows more than corn and alfalfa — it produces people with a uniquely dry sense of humor. He grew up in Hudson, Ohio, and he’s been writing hilarious casuals (now unfortunately called “Shouts & Murmurs”) for the New Yorker for 50 years.
“Ohio was my cradle for humor,” Frazier says in a recent interview. “We could claim the best humor writer of all time — James Thurber, from Columbus.” He also reveres Jonathan Winters, who was from Dayton. Richard Pryor, he notes, was from Peoria, Ill.
What makes a piece of writing funny is a mystery, says Frazier. “A humor piece is a kind of poem,” he says. “Each sentence has to pull more weight than a sentence in a reported piece or even in a work of fiction.” He offers an example from “What I’d Say to the Martians” by Jack Handey: “I came here in peace, seeking gold and slaves, but you have treated me like an intruder.” Each word in that sentence is essential, says Frazier.
In his New Yorker essay “What’s So Funny?,” Tad Friend explains the “incongruity theory” of humor and offers some rules of thumb about jokes. One is that the punch line or “reveal word” of a joke should come last. Looking for examples in Dan Okrent’s comedy revue, Old Jews Telling Jokes, I realized that few of the jokes in that show can be told in these pages. Besides, Okrent wrote in New York magazine, “jokes on the printed page can be as limp as a lox.”
But every now and then somebody at the Independent turns in something unexpectedly funny. Last week we talked about whether Joe Beuerlein’s landscaping article about famous gardens and mini golf was the funniest piece we’ve ever published. (Joe is from Tennessee.) His comparison of the course at the Gift Barn in Eastham, complete with giant rabbit, with the Sacro Bosco, the Duke of Bomarzo’s 16th-century Italian garden, certainly qualifies under the incongruity theory. And there were plenty of sentences that combined poetry with punch: “Having found myself lured into a garden where horrors might lurk, my heart began to race. I warily approached the next obstacle: a turtle’s butt.”
But humor is subjective, and some readers may place Beuerlein second behind James Judd’s “Beware of Gypsy the Terrier.” Or Josephine de La Bruyère’s “Dougie Freeman Takes a Bow.” In my book they’re all weird — but in a Carson kind of way.
